FireWire for 75% Better Mac mini Disk Performance

peterdaly writes "As a proud new owner of a Mac mini, I quickly discovered the internal hard drive performance was so pathetic compared to what I was used to that I needed to do something about it ... preferably on the cheap. I ended up trying a FireWire attached storage enclosure and using an older 80GB drive I had in my closet from a dead PC. My mini got about a 75 percent disk performance increase for about $50 (or $100 if you need a drive). Here is a benchmark of before and after as well as information about my research and upgrade. If you already have at least 512MB RAM, this may be the best performance bang for your buck if you're looking for your mini to be faster and more responsive."

Comments

And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure. But many of the FireWire enclosures out there are what I would call, well, damned ugly. And huge. Way more huge than they need to be. And way too ugly and clunky to go with a computer like the Mac mini, unless you bought it completely for price and could care less about appearances.

Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):

http://www.micronet.com/General/minimate.asp

Re:And if you want something really cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's true that since the Mac mini uses a 2.5" laptop hard drive by default, which is why the disk performance is relatively poor. This is why you can achieve greater performance with a 3.5" drive coupled with a FireWire enclosure.

snip
The internal drive is slow cause it is a cheap/low end drive. A decent 7200 rpm notebook drive as a replacement will greatly improve the performance of a mini. (And the run cooler) Just upgrade the internal drive (yes, many people have done this) and you dont need an ugly extra external drive or even a pretty one that takes up more space.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[daveschroeder]

Can you buy two of those and run them in RAID-1?

Absolutely.

With Disk Utility, it's just a matter of dragging the disks into a RAID set, and you're done.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[itistoday]

*ahem* For those not aware Disk Utility is a free hard disk utility that comes with every mac, and every OS X installation.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[rossifer]

7200rpm notebook drive

Regards,
Ross

Re:And if you want something really cool

[s100w]

Works great once it's set up and you don't change things. Sometimes my Firewire RAID array wouldn't show up correctly if OS X detected the drives in a different order.

And maybe this is obvious, but I couldn't find a way to move to OS X software RAID over to a Linux box without reformatting the drives.

Re:And if you want something really cool

[steve_bryan]

Hmm, I'm not certain if I am reading your comment correctly but if you are asking if a Mac can format a floppy while doing other tasks the answer is a qualified YES. Macs haven't had floppy drives for quite a few years but with OS X the Mac is much more robust and stable than WindowsXP at doing things like formatting disks as just one more task that can easily be done in the background. Of course you can still buy floppy drives from third party companies if you want to format some floppies on a Mac and check my assertion.

My personal experience with loading down OS X with tasks versus doing the same sort of thing with WindowsXP is that the Mac just keeps working while my Windows box becomes unusable and often will crash. For instance if I'm watching HDTV on my PC and absent mindedly use Samba to transfer a file to or from my PC it is time to reboot. I can do things on my PC when it is formatting but it isn't pretty. Finally, the thing that really matters is that Azureus functions invisibly in the background on my Mac but it is a pain the butt if I try to run it on my PC and anything else happens.

So oddly enough that old chesnut about Windows users happily formatting floppies in the background to the amazement of Mac pre OS X users has been turned completely around for OS X.

I have nothing to do with that product...

[daveschroeder]

...and no vested interest of any kind in anything relating to it, and didn't submit the story.

But thanks for your concern!

Yes

[peterdaly]

Recent Macs boot from a firewire drive just fine.

Been using a USB 2.0 Drive....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I use a 120 GB Simpletech USB 2.0 drive as my capture/video editing repository and it works smashingly well. One time I forgot about saving the project to the Powerbook drive and was wondering why in heck iMovie HD was dropping frames and discovered I was using the internal drive. The USB 2.0 drive performs WAY better.

ask and you are answered...

[mbaudis]

here (or google...): http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/hitachi_travelstar6 0GB_7200/travelstar60GB_7200rpm.html

Re:Question

[sankyuu]

The process (from TFA):

1. Install the IDE drive into the FireWire Enclosure. In addition to opening the enclosure and putting it back together, this will probably involve plugging in two cables (power and IDE) into the drive and possibly (depending on the design) screwing in 4 screws.

2. Plug the enclosure into the Mac Mini using a FireWire cable and power.

3. Format/Erase the drive using Apple's Disk Utility...OSX may prompt you depending on how the drive setup. (You'll lose any data on the drive during this step.)

4. Clone the internal disk to the FireWire Drive using Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)

5. Change the Startup Disk using the System Preferences Startup Disk control panel

6. Reboot

7. Make sure everything went well, do some testing to make sure everything is working and all your data is on the new drive.

8. Erase your internal drive to avoid confusion of duplicate files.

Either that, or he's just trying get you to mix up the steps and erase both your drives. ;)

this is not NEW news. check bareFeats.com

[henk]

from Feb 4th 2005
REVIEW: Mac mini -- internal and external hard drive tests

http://www.barefeats.com/mini01c.html

good analysis w/ lotsa pretty graphs

Recent Macs only? Not

[sjonke]

I don't consider my clamshell iBook G3 333 or my PowerMac G4 Dual-533, or my iMac G3 400 MHz to be recent. All of them boot from firewire. Indeed the only firewire Mac that doesn't boot from firewire is the very first one: the blue & white PowerMac G3 tower. If you're looking for a Mac on the cheap, my advice is that you take a pass on any Blue & White - it isn't worth any price IMHO, and not just due to the non-booting firewire.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

As a bonus for those of us who want more utility out of our portable boot disks, all FireWire-equipped PowerBooks and any FireWire equipped desktop since some of the later G4s have the ability to boot in what Apple appropriately calles "FireWire disk mode". Pressing the "T" key at startup turns your $2500.00 Mac into a $100.00 firewire disk enclosure.

Any it's not just the hard disk -- the optical drive is shared too, at least on later model system.

I used my PowerBook's DVD drive to install Tiger onto my girlfriend's CD-only iBook. Very handy indeed.

Re:I bought the MacMini for the form factor..

[quarkscat]

So sorry -- I don't have a Mac Mini that I can provide some subjective data on. I do, however,
have a Mac Powerbook which I replaced the OEM drive in.

The OEM drive was a Fujitsu 5400 RPM 60 GB disk. I replaced it with a Hitachi 7200 RPM 60 GB disk. The replacement disk has the same/similar power saving features as the OEM, so the PBK firmware and the OS (10.3.9) have good control. I have experienced a noticable improvement in the speed of loading applications, as well as spooling large files to disk. (The Hitachi drive has a far larger onboard cache that helps a lot.) I have lost about 15 minutes worth of battery time when untethered from an AC mains source. Over all, excepting the high cost premium charged for the 7200 RPM drive, my upgrade has been a net plus.

Just my $00.02 worth...

no effect on heat and battery

[Wabbit Wabbit]

I replaced the stock drive in my 17" RevA powerbook with the 7200rpm 60gb Hitachi.

No change in noise, heat or battery drain.

The performance gain is notcieable and very welcome.

Re:Size/Price/Performance - 3.5" always beats 2.5"

[evilviper]

Firewire shoeboxes are usually a bit more expensive than USB2, but I don't know if Apple's USB2 drivers are as fast as their firewire drivers, so check it out if it matters to you.

Uhh, 480Mbps USB2.0 is slower than Firewire-400, period. No matter how wonderful the software/drivers, nothing can change that. Yes, I realize the numbers for USB2 are higher, but they are just marketing numbers, and reality is very different.

Re:Quality control

[Gilmoure]

No, Apple's moved from the $1500-$3500 range for computers down to $500-$2500 range. In order to keep profits up, costs have to be cut. In part, this is done through good design but more seems to be through commodity manufacturing, out-house. When you're having your stuff built on someone else's assembly line, it's hard to keep on top of quality control.